Man and Nature Part 24

Another proof of the control of the limbs by the eye has been observed in deaf-and-dumb schools, and others where pupils are first taught to write on large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large characters, the small letters being an inch or more high. They are formed with chalk or a slate pencil firmly grasped in the fingers, and by appropriate motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, not of the finger joints. Nevertheless, when a pen is put into the hand of a pupil thus taught, his handwriting, though produced by a totally different set of muscles and muscular movements, is identical in character with that which he has practised on the blackboard.

It has been much doubted whether the artists of the cla.s.sic ages possessed a more perfect sight than those of modern times, or whether, in executing their minute mosaics and gem engravings, they used magnifiers. Gla.s.ses ground convex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too rudely fashioned and too imperfectly polished to have been of any practical use for optical purposes. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic vision, their astronomers cannot have had a telescopic power of sight; for they did not discover the satellites of Jupiter, which are often seen with the naked eye at Oormeeah, in Persia, and sometimes, as I can testify by personal observation, at Cairo.

For a very remarkable account of the restoration of vision impaired from age, by judicious training, see _Lessons in Life_, by TIMOTHY t.i.tCOMB, lesson xi.

[9] _Antiquity of Man_, p. 377.

[10] "One of them [the Indians] seated himself near me, and made from a fragment of quartz, with a simple piece of round bone, one end of which was hemispherical, with a small crease in it (as if worn by a thread) the sixteenth of an inch deep, an arrow head which was very sharp and piercing, and such as they use on all their arrows. The skill and rapidity with which it was made, without a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp edges with the creased bone by the strength of his hands--for the crease merely served to prevent the instrument from slipping, affording no leverage--was remarkable."--_Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Pacific Railroad_, vol. ii, 1855, _Lieut._ BECKWITH'S _Report_, p. 43.

It has been said that stone weapons are not found in Sicily, except in certain caves half filled with the skeletons of extinct animals. If they have not been found in that island in more easily accessible localities, I suspect it is because eyes familiar with such objects have not sought for them. In January, 1854, I picked up an arrow head of quartz in a little ravine or furrow just washed out by a heavy rain, in a field near the Simeto. It is rudely fashioned, but its artificial character and its special purpose are quite unequivocal.

[11] Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of studying the laws of acclimation of plants as maize or Indian corn.

Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47 in Northeastern America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three degrees of lat.i.tude brings you to a new variety, with new climatic adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to accommodate itself to new conditions of temperature and season seems almost unlimited. We may easily suppose a variety of this grain, which had become acclimated in still higher lat.i.tudes, to have been lost, and in such case the failure to raise a crop from seed brought from some distance to the south would not prove that the climate had become colder.

Many persons now living remember that, when the common tomato was first introduced into Northern New England, it often failed to ripen; but, in the course of a very few years, it completely adapted itself to the climate, and now not only matures both its fruit and its seeds with as much certainty as any cultivated vegetable, but regularly propagates itself by self-sown seed. Meteorological observations, however, do not show any amelioration of the summer climate in those States within that period. See _Appendix_, No. 1.

Maize and the tomato, if not new to human use, have not been long known to civilization, and were, very probably, reclaimed and domesticated at a much more recent period than the plants which form the great staples of agricultural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power of accomodation to climate possessed by them due to this circ.u.mstance?

There is some reason to suppose that the character of maize has been sensibly changed by cultivation in South America; for, according to Poppig, the ears of this grain found in old Peruvian tombs belong to varieties not now known in Peru.--_Travels in Peru_, chap. vii.

[12] The cultivation of madder is said to have been introduced into Europe by an Oriental in the year 1765, and it was first planted in the neighborhood of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less than a century; but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is already losing much of its coloring properties.--LAVERGNE, _economie Rurale de la France_, pp. 259-291.

I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the vicinity of Avignon is of recent introduction; but it appears from Fuller and other evidence, that this plant was grown in Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century. The madder brought to France from Persia may be of a different species, or, at least, variety. "Some two years since," says Fuller, "madder was sown by Sir Nicholas Crispe at Debtford, and I hope will have good success; first because it groweth in Zeland in the same (if not a more _northern_) _lat.i.tude_. Secondly, because _wild madder_ grows here in abundance; and why may not _tame madder_ if _cicurated_ by art. Lastly, because as good as any grew some thirty years since at Barn-Elms, in Surrey, though it quit not cost through some error in the first planter thereof, which now we hope will be rectified."--FULLER, _Worthies of England_, ii, pp. 57, 58.

Perhaps the recent diseases of the olive, the vine, and the silkworm--the prevailing malady of which insect is supposed by some to be the effect of an incipient decay of the mulberry tree--may be, in part, due to changes produced in the character of the soil by exhaustion through long cultivation.

[13] In many parts of New England there are tracts, miles in extent, and presenting all varieties of surface and exposure, which were partially cleared sixty or seventy years ago, and where little or no change in the proportion of cultivated ground, pasturage, and woodland has taken place since. In some cases, these tracts compose basins apparently scarcely at all exposed to any local influence in the way of percolation or infiltration of water toward or from neighboring valleys. But in such situations, apart from accidental disturbances, the ground is growing drier and drier, from year to year, springs are still disappearing, and rivulets still diminishing in their summer supply of water. A probable explanation of this is to be found in the rapid drainage of the surface of cleared ground, which prevents the subterranean natural reservoirs, whether cavities or merely strata of bibulous earth, from filling up.

How long this process is to last before an equilibrium is reached, none can say. It may be, for years; it may be, for centuries.

Livingstone states facts which favor the supposition that a secular desiccation is still going on in central Africa. When the regions where the earth is growing drier were cleared of wood, or, indeed, whether forests ever grew there, we are unable to say, but the change appears to have been long in progress. There is reason to suspect a similar revolution in Arabia Petraea. In many of the wadis, and particularly in the gorges between Wadi Feiran and Wadi Esh Sheikh, there are water-worn banks showing that, at no very remote period, the winter floods must have risen fifty feet in channels where the growth of acacias and tamarisks and the testimony of the Arabs concur to prove that they have not risen six feet within the memory or tradition of the present inhabitants. There is little probability that any considerable part of the Sinaitic peninsula has been wooded since its first occupation by man, and we must seek the cause of its increasing dryness elsewhere than in the removal of the forest.

[14] The soil of newly subdued countries is generally in a high degree favorable to the growth of the fruits of the garden and the orchard, but usually becomes much less so in a very few years. Plums, of many varieties, were formerly grown, in great perfection and abundance, in many parts of New England where at present they can scarcely be reared at all; and the peach, which, a generation or two ago, succeeded admirably in the southern portion of the same States, has almost ceased to be cultivated there. The disappearance of these fruits is partly due to the ravages of insects, which have in later years attacked them; but this is evidently by no means the sole, or even the princ.i.p.al cause of their decay. In these cases, it is not to the exhaustion of the particular acres on which the fruit trees have grown that we are to ascribe their degeneracy, but to a general change in the condition of the soil or the air; for it is equally impossible to rear them successfully on absolutely new land in the neighborhood of grounds where, not long since, they bore the finest fruit.

I remember being told, many years ago, by one of the earliest settlers of the State of Ohio, a very intelligent and observing person, that the apple trees raised there from seed sown soon after the land was cleared, bore fruit in less than half the time required to bring to bearing those reared from seed sown when the ground had been twenty years under cultivation.

In the peat mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other trees not now growing in the same localities, are found in abundance. Every generation of trees leaves the soil in a different state from that in which it found it; every tree that springs up in a group of trees of another species than its own, grows under different influences of light and shade and atmosphere from its predecessors. Hence the succession of crops, which occurs in all natural forests, seems to be due rather to changes of condition than of climate. See chapter iii, _post_.

[15] The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal.

Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific inst.i.tution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the direction of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, upon inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compa.s.s-points to indicate the quarter _from_ which the wind blew, while others employed them to signify the quarter _toward_ which the atmospheric currents were moving. In some instances, the observers were no longer within the reach of inquiry, and of course their tables of the wind were of no value.

"Winds," says Mrs. Somerville, "are named from the points whence they blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east; whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows toward the east."--_Physical Geography_, p. 229.

There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably originated in a confusion of the terminations _-wardly_ and _-erly_, both of which are modern. The root of the former ending implies the direction _to_ or _to-ward_ which motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin _versus_. The termination _-erly_ is a corruption or softening of _-ernly_, easterly for easternly, and many authors of the seventeenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i, p.

2), _easterly_ is applied to place, "_easterly_ bounds," and means _eastern_. In a pa.s.sage in Drayton, "_easterly_ winds" must mean winds _from_ the east; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses _northerly_ for _northern_. Hakewell says: "The sonne cannot goe more _southernely_ from vs, nor come more _northernely_ towards vs." Holland, in his translation of Pliny, referring to the moon has: "When shee is _northerly_," and "shee is gone _southerly_." Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, quotes a pa.s.sage from Dampier where _westerly_ is applied to the wind, but the context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termination in _-wardly_ given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means _toward_ the west.

Shakspeare, in _Hamlet_ (v. ii), uses _northerly_ wind for wind _from_ the north. Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in _-an_ or _-en_, _-ern_ and _-weard_, the last always meaning the point _toward_ which motion is supposed, the others that _from_ which it proceeds.

We use an _east_ wind, an _eastern_ wind, and an _easterly_ wind, to signify the same thing. The two former expressions are old, and constant in meaning; the last is recent, superfluous, and equivocal. See _Appendix_, No. 2.

[16] I do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi valley, which cannot properly be said ever to have been a field of British colonization; but of the original colonies, and their dependencies in the territory of the present United States, and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state of equilibrium, though under very different conditions.

[17] The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself.

But so great are the recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation and pasturage kept down the forest growth.

[18] The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well settled. We have _bog_, _swamp_, _marsh_, _mora.s.s_,_ moor_, _fen_, _turf moss_, _peat moss_, _quagmire_, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclusively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where, especially in the Lappish provinces, this terr-aqueous formation is very extensive and important, the names of its different kinds are more specific in their application. The general designation of all soils permanently pervaded with water is _Karr_. The elder Laestadius divides the _Karr_ into two genera: _Myror_ (sing. _myra_), and _Mossar_ (sing. _mosse_). "The former," he observes, "are gra.s.s-grown, and overflowed with water through almost the whole summer; the latter are covered with mosses and always moist, but very seldom overflowed." He enumerates the following species of _Myra_, the character of which will perhaps be sufficiently understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the vernacular names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the language and the subject: 1. _Homyror_, paludes graminosae. 2. _Dy_, paludes profundae. 3. _Flarkmyror_, or proper _karr_, paludes limosae. 4. _Fjallmyror_, paludes uliginosae. 5.

_Tufmyror_, paludes caespitosae. 6. _Rismyror_, paludes virgatae. 7.

_Starrangar_, prata irrigata, with their subdivisions, dry _starrangar_ or _risangar_, wet _starrangar_ and _frakengropar_. 8. _Polar_, laeunae.

9. _Golar_, fossae inundatae. The _Mossar_, paludes turfosae, which are of great extent, have but two species: 1. _Torfmossar_, called also _Mossmyror_ and _Snottermyror_, and, 2. _Bjornmossar_.

The acc.u.mulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into _Tr[=a]sk_, stagna, and _Tjernar_ or _Tjarnar_ (sing. _Tjern_ or _Tjarn_), stagnatiles. _Tr[=a]sk_ are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; _Tjernar_ are small _Trask_ situated within the limits of _Mossar_.--L.

L. LaeSTADIUS, _om Mojligheten af Uppodlingar i Lappmarken_, pp. 23, 24.

[19] Although the quant.i.ty of bog land in New England is less than in many other regions of equal area, yet there is a considerable extent of this formation in some of the Northeastern States. Dana (_Manual of Geology_, p. 614) states that the quant.i.ty of peat in Ma.s.sachusetts is estimated at 120,000,000 cords, or nearly 569,000,000 cubic yards, but he does not give either the area or the depth of the deposits. In any event, however, bogs cover but a small percentage of the territory in any of the Northern States, while it is said that one tenth of the whole surface of Ireland is composed of bogs, and there are still extensive tracts of undrained marsh in England.

Bogs, independently of their importance in geology as explaining the origin of some kinds of mineral coal, have a present value as repositories of fuel. Peat beds have sometimes a thickness of ten or twelve yards, or even more. A depth of ten yards would give 48,000 cubic yards to the acre. The greatest quant.i.ty of firewood yielded by the forests of New England to the acre is 100 cords solid measure, or 474 cubic yards; but this comprises only the trunks and larger branches. If we add the small branches and twigs, it is possible that 600 cubic yards might, in some cases, be cut on an acre. This is only one eightieth part of the quant.i.ty of peat sometimes found on the same area. It is true that a yard of peat and a yard of wood are not the equivalents of each other, but the fuel on an acre of deep peat is worth much more than that on an acre of the best woodland. Besides this, wood is perishable, and the quant.i.ty on an acre cannot be increased beyond the amount just stated; peat is indestructible, and the beds are always growing.

[20] "Aquatic plants have a utility in raising the level of marshy grounds, which renders them very valuable, and may well be called a geological function. * * *

"The engineer drains ponds at a great expense by lowering the surface of the water; nature attains the same end, gratuitously, by raising the level of the soil without depressing that of the water; but she proceeds more slowly. There are, in the Landes, marshes where this natural filling has a thickness of four metres, and some of them, at first lower than the sea, have been thus raised and drained so as to grow summer crops, such, for example, as maize."--BOITEL, _Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres_, p. 227.

The bogs of Denmark--the examination of which by Steenstrup and Vaupell has presented such curious results with respect to the natural succession of forest trees--appear to have gone through this gradual process of drying, and the birch, which grows freely in very wet soils, has contributed very effectually by its annual deposits to raise the surface above the water level, and thus to prepare the ground for the oak.--VAUPELL, _Bogens Indvandring_, pp. 39, 40.

[21] Careful examination of the peat mosses in North Sjaelland--which are so abundant in fossil wood that, within thirty years, they have yielded above a million of trees--shows that the trees have generally fallen from age and not from wind. They are found in depressions on the declivities of which they grew, and they lie with the top lowest, always falling toward the bottom of the valley.--VAUPELL, _Bogens Indvandring i de Danske Skove_, pp. 10, 14.

[22] The locust insect, _c.l.i.tus pictus_, which deposits its eggs in the American locust, _Robinia pseudacacia_, is one of these, and its ravages have been and still are most destructive to that very valuable tree, so remarkable for combining rapidity of growth with strength and durability of wood. This insect, I believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so general employment of the _Robinia_ to clothe and protect embankments and the scarps of deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief. As a traveller, however, I should find some compensation for this evil in the destruction of these acacia hedges, which as completely obstruct the view on hundreds of miles of French and Italian railways, as the garden walls of the same countries do on the ordinary roads. See _Appendix_, No. 4.

[23] In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more numerous and destructive to trees than in the primitive forests of America, and the same remark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as moles, mice, and squirrels. In the dense native wood, the ground and the air are too humid, the depth of shade too great for many tribes of these creatures, while near the natural meadows and other open grounds, where circ.u.mstances are otherwise more favorable for their existence and multiplication, their numbers are kept down by birds, serpents, foxes, and smaller predacious quadrupeds. In civilized countries, these natural enemies of the worm, the beetle and the mole, are persecuted, sometimes almost exterminated, by man, who also removes from his plantations the decayed or wind-fallen trees, the shrubs and underwood, which, in a state of nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the rodent, and often also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, and they become destructive to the forest because they are driven to the living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of Fontainebleau is almost wholly without birds, and their absence is ascribed by some writers to the want of water, which, in the thirsty sands of that wood, does not gather into running brooks; but the want of undergrowth is perhaps an equally good reason for their scarcity. In a wood of spontaneous growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not attack trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, but he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. "The squirrels bite the cones of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the wood; they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a strip of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The squirrel is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws the bark of tress twenty or twenty-five years old." But even here, nature sometimes provides a compensation, by making the appet.i.te of this quadruped serve to prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends to obstruct the due growth of the leading shoot. "In some of the pineries of Brittany which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the development of the leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that the pines are most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result attributed to the repression of the cones by this rodent."--BOITEL, _Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres_, p. 50. See _Appendix_, No. 5.

[24] The terrible destructiveness of man is remarkably exemplified in the chase of large mammalia and birds for single products, attended with the entire waste of enormous quant.i.ties of flesh, and of other parts of the animal, which are capable of valuable uses. The wild cattle of South America are slaughtered by millions for their hides and horns; the buffalo of North America for his skin or his tongue; the elephant, the walrus, and the narwhal for their tusks; the cetacea, and some other marine animals, for their oil and whalebone; the ostrich and other large birds, for their plumage. Within a few years, sheep have been killed in New England by whole flocks, for their pelts and suet alone, the flesh being thrown away; and it is even said that the bodies of the same quadrupeds have been used in Australia as fuel for limekilns. What a vast amount of human nutriment, of bone, and of other animal products valuable in the arts, is thus recklessly squandered! In nearly all these cases, the part which const.i.tutes the motive for this wholesale destruction, and is alone saved, is essentially of insignificant value as compared with what is thrown away. The horns and hide of an ox are not economically worth a tenth part as much as the entire carca.s.s.

One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvements of civilization is, that increased facilities of communication will render it possible to transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is now wasted because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. The cattle slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed millions of the starving population of the Old World, if their flesh could be economically preserved and transported across the ocean.

We are beginning to learn a better economy in dealing with the inorganic world. The utilization--or, as the Germans more happily call it, the Verwerthung, the _beworthing_--of waste from metallurgical, chemical, and manufacturing establishments, is among the most important results of the application of science to industrial purposes. The incidental products from the laboratories of manufacturing chemists often become more valuable than those for the preparation of which they were erected.

The slags from silver refineries, and even from smelting houses of the coa.r.s.er metals, have not unfrequently yielded to a second operator a better return than the first had derived from dealing with the natural ore; and the saving of lead carried off in the smoke of furnaces has, of itself, given a large profit on the capital invested in the works. A few years ago, an officer of an American mint was charged with embezzling gold committed to him for coinage. He insisted, in his defence, that much of the metal was volatilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon sc.r.a.ping the chimneys of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency.

[25] It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the domestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, belongs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, the conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced stages of artificial culture. It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the psychology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life, that although these humble tribes and individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of the lower animals to the gratification of their appet.i.tes and the supply of their other physical wants, yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much more feebly felt by civilized men. The popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers, and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary composition.

In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though persecuted as a destroyer of more domestic beasts, or hunted for food, is regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. Some of the North American aboriginal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear hunt; and the Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes to the same animal "_ti M[oe]nds Styrke og tolv M[oe]nds Vid_,"

ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but they still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient superst.i.tion invested him.

The student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of _Finnbogi hinn rami_ a curious ill.u.s.tration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an Icelandic champion--dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric words on that of Finnbogi--followed by a duel, in which the latter, who had thrown away his arms and armor in order that the combatants might meet on equal terms, was victorious.

Drummond Hay's very interesting work on Morocco contains many amusing notices of a similar feeling entertained by the Moors toward the redoubtable enemy of their flocks--the lion.

This sympathy helps us to understand how it is that most if not all the domestic animals--if indeed they ever existed in a wild state--were appropriated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into organized and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant had acquired substantially its present artificial character, and that the properties of nearly all vegetable drugs and poisons were known at the remotest period to which historical records reach. Did nature bestow upon primitive man some instinct akin to that by which she teaches the brute to select the nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indiscriminately mixed in forest and pasture?

This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has been hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an original faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar to persons engaged in sheep husbandry in New England--and I have seen it confirmed by personal observation--that sheep bred where the common laurel, as it is called, _Kalmia angustifolia_, abounds, almost always avoid browsing upon the leaves of that plant, while those brought from districts where laurel is unknown, and turned into pastures where it grows, very often feed upon it and are poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hereditary instinct, of a different character, may not improperly be noticed here. I refer to that by which horses bred in provinces where quicksands are common avoid their dangers or extricate themselves from them. See BReMONTIER, _Memoire sur les Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1833: _premier semestre_, pp. 155-157.

It is commonly said in New England, and I believe with reason, that the crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows which were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plunderers of the cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented for its protection. See _Appendix_, No. 6.

Civilization has added little to the number of vegetable or animal species grown in our fields or bred in our folds, while, on the contrary, the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension of man's sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her substance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in the blowpipe, is more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems almost unknown except to civilized man. I have myself seen European peasants to whom one of the simplest applications of this latter power was a revelation.